SUMMARY: The Developmental Research Project Program (DRPP) is a new mandatory component for INBRE 3 with a goal to select and support the most promising research within the Wyoming INBRE scientific themes of ?cardiometabolic syndrome? and ?technology for chronic disease research and therapeutics?. Our goal is to augment and strengthen the Network by providing research opportunities to faculty and students and requiring standards for research excellence. Both themes tackle rather significant health issues in the State of Wyoming and the INBRE goal is to build a collaborative interdisciplinary research team to develop and apply new targets and tools to address intractable biomedical problems. These two themes are sufficiently broad to include the majority of the most productive researchers, yet specific enough to define an area of emphasis to recruit faculty and build graduate training programs. The DRPP is required to: 1) provide an internal mechanism (internal Funding Opportunity Announcement) for obtaining and awarding multidisciplinary developmental research projects, 2) review and prioritize those projects for funding, 3) develop a plan for their general mentoring, and 4) offer oversight, and evaluation, as well as assure their full compliance with all applicable federal policies, rules, and guidelines for research involving human subjects, vertebrate animals, and/or biohazards. One major challenge for the DRPP is to engage the community college partners (Wyoming's Primarily Undergraduate Institutions) in an effort to enhance biomedical research across the state. The DRPP offers several mechanisms to foster research collaborations between the lead and partner PUI institutions. To overcome the major barriers for PUI researchers due to being isolated in their research and lack of institutional support for research in a PUI environment where teaching is the primary responsibility, we will increase resources allocated to PUIs and facilitate collaboration between INBRE funded UW investigators and PUI faculty by increasing the number of collaborative grants available, requiring UW investigators to dedicate 10% of their award to PUI collaboration, and increasing the number of INBRE Network workshops, trainings and networking events to increase cross network interaction. The DRPP has established an internal mechanism for soliciting grant applications, reviewing and prioritizing applications. The DRPP offers a plan for general mentoring, career development, faculty retention, and evaluation, as well as assurance in compliance with all applicable federal policies, rules, and guidelines. These approaches provide a step-by-step mechanism to better engage PUI faculty and students into biomedical research and foster career development of junior investigators for competitive research across the network.